Alex Allmont is a full-time coder, a part-time Ph.D. in polyrhythmic music, and a long-time Lego fan. All those things come together in his latest creation, a fantastically complex Lego machine that churns out mesmerizing electronic music.
Play House, as he calls it, was built for AudioGraft, an experimental music festival in Oxford, England. Spread out across a small tabletop, the assembly triggers sampled drums and digital notes based on those of the Roland TB303, the synthesizer whose belching bass gave rise to acid house in the '80s. (The machine, Allmont tells us, is not concerned with "the white-gloves-and-whistles sort of acid house, but the more spatial stuff, inspired by artists like Plastikman and Basic Channel." Glad we cleared that up!)
But as Allmont explains in a lengthy post on Make, the original proposal for the machine was even more complicated, involving ambitious random number generators and percussive elements supplied by Lego mechanisms playing real-life drums. Even for those who aren't Lego Technic devotees, this 10-minute clip of Allmont walking through iterations of a particular mechanism is strangely captivating.
